One of the best conferences for students of advanced storage concepts is the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies. This year it is in San Francisco on February 24–27 and the StorageMojo team will be there.
The final frontier
As the transition to digital data accelerates the issues inherent in massive digital storage gain prominence. Some interesting topics this year include:
- The Case of the Fake Picasso: Preventing History Forgery with Secure Provenance
- Understanding Customer Problem Troubleshooting from Storage System Logs
- Sparse Indexing: Large Scale, Inline Deduplication Using Sampling and Locality
- Spyglass: Fast, Scalable Metadata Search for Large-Scale Storage Systems
- Smoke and Mirrors: Reflecting Files at a Geographically Remote Location Without Loss of Performance
- A Performance Evaluation and Examination of Open-Source Erasure Coding Libraries for Storage
The StorageMojo take
Think of FAST as a tradeshow for advanced ideas in storage – and no salesman will call. The next 5 years will be a time of extraordinary change. FAST is a periscope into the clear air of the academy.
Most of what gets presented will never be a product – but the concepts will shape the products we buy in a few years. If architecture and strategy are part of your portfolio, FAST is a good investment.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
Many of the papers with industry co-authors, are often based on successful products that have shipped for many years. So it’s not entirely true that most of what is presented will never be a product. FAST papers probably reflect products far more than any other academic conference.
Ahh yes FAST this was one conference that I was really looking forward to attending. But with the weak dollar coming over from Australia , is going to be a tad to pricey.
Never mind USENIX seem to post most of the content online , and I’m sure you’ll have some stuff posted here.
David
Maybe the UCSD project Cumulus: Back up Filesystem to the Cloud should also deserve a special mention here.
In case some of you guys can’t make it to FAST, I have some slides on my paper (“The Case of the Fake Picasso …”) available in my website: http://www.ragibhasan.com/
Video of a recent talk I gave on the extended version of the paper is available at http://www.iti.uiuc.edu/content/iti-trust-and-security-seminar-tss (2/11/2009 talk, video should be up by this weekend).
And for those who’ll be attending FAST, see you there …